It is three days'
journey in length, so that a traveller passing through the city has to
make his marches and his halts!.. It is subdivided into six towns, each
of which has a separate enclosure, while one great wall surrounds the
whole," etc. (Cathay, p. 496 seqq.)
Let us conclude with a writer of a later age, the worthy Jesuit Martin
Martini, the author of the admirable Atlas Sinensis, one whose
honourable zeal to maintain Polo's veracity, of which he was one of the
first intelligent advocates, is apt, it must be confessed, a little to
colour his own spectacles: - "That the cosmographers of Europe may no
longer make such ridiculous errors as to the QUINSAI of Marco Polo, I will
here give you the very place. [He then explains the name.] ... And to come
to the point; this is the very city that hath those bridges so lofty and
so numberless, both within the walls and in the suburbs; nor will they
fall much short of the 10,000 which the Venetian alleges, if you count
also the triumphal arches among the bridges, as he might easily do because
of their analogous structure, just as he calls tigers lions;.. or if
you will, he may have meant to include not merely the bridges in the city
and suburbs, but in the whole of the dependent territory.
